September 13, 2007

Sounds Like A New Yorker

*

The man who’s looking at me circumspectly from under a black ‘Subway Q&A’ baseball cap has, it seems, lived in every single apartment in New York City. “I moved to the YMCA in 1989,” he remembers, touching the tips of his fingers together. “I lived there for a few weeks. Then I lived on—” and here he starts to enumerate, using his fingers to count—“15th Street, 16th Street, 2nd Avenue in a huuuge place, West Broadway, Avenue A, I was paying less than $500 a month then, and two different apartments on Mott Street. Every time I heard about a better apartment, I’d move. Then I found a place on Perry Street. I’ve been there for years now, it’s got two fireplaces and I look south across the city.” He smiles. “But I’m thinking about moving to Park Slope.”

I know how Todd feels. In the six months I’ve been here, my suitcases have worn themselves out migrating from Carroll Gardens to Chinatown and the Upper West Side to Red Hook. Because New York looks different from every angle, it actually feels like I’ve lived in four different cities. “No matter how big a city,” Todd corroborates, “you only live in a small part of it. You make your own small town.”

New York has been letting him down lately, though—according to Todd, the Big Apple ain’t as good as it used to be. “When young people can’t afford to move to an area…” he grumbles. I kind of agree. Pathetic as it makes me sound, I came here looking for la vie bohème, and unless it’s really hiding, its closest relations are Williamsburg hipsters, which are in fact not close relations at all.

When he first moved to New York from Chicago (to which he’d moved from a part of Louisville that’s “like a Jewish Westchester with a Southern drawl”), Todd worked as an outreach worker with the junkies on Bowery. “Bowery was the last stop,” he says. “By that time, they’d cut all ties, they lived in flop houses in beds separated only by chicken wire. My efforts mostly failed. Junkies are self-absorbed and selfish; that’s the nature of addiction.” The Bowery wore him out, so he studied international affairs at NYU and did archival research on architects, artists and designer furniture. He worked as a stockbroker for a while, then wrote for men’s magazines about cool things like free shit, survivors of tiger shark attacks, absinthe, Funkmaster Flex, and what happens when you go to New Jersey and put plastic explosives inside a pair of hiking boots. In short, he was a real New Yorker. “I like going to buffets,” he says. “Eating a little of this, a little of that.” But it was the advent of September 11th, the retelling of which still makes him tear up, that really turned him into a New Yorker. It galvanized him into becoming a paramedic.

Todd would rather I not write about that, so I won’t, except to say that I learned three things from our conversation: 1.) Starbucks locations in New York are tremendous junkie hotspots, due to the individual bathrooms; 2.) there actually is a drug out there that can turn you instantaneously sober if you’re extremely fucked up—where was that when I was in college?—and 3.) damn, I promised not to write about it. Oh yeah, here’s one: 3.) “skell” is another word for bum.

There are so many things that Todd says and then retracts (“I’d
appreciate it if you could keep that off the record,”) that by the end
of our conversation, more of my notes are crossed out than not. My
theory about this, like most of my other theories on Todd, attributes
it to his being a New Yorker; being so short on personal space makes us
gluttons for it. Here are conversations that actually happened:

Todd: “So there’s this unconscious guy on the floor with a fucking hypo
in his arm, his girlfriend is frantic, we’re giving him CPR, I’m with
these medics I’ll call Janie and Jack**. Oh shit [pause]. Those are
their real names. Uh. Can you keep those off the record?”

Todd: “So I belong to a skeptics group that meets on a regular basis.”
Nathalie: “Really? So…you sit around and doubt together?”
Todd: “No. [withering look.] But I’d rather not talk about it. The world is a little too small these days.”

Todd: “So I have a political blog, an art collecting blog, and a skepticism blog.”
Nathalie [very interested]: “Really? Where can I find them?”
Todd: “I’d rather not say. All good blogs are anonymous, I hate the
whole cult-of-personality thing. I like that the Internet divorces
people from their opinions. Besides, by remaining unidentified you
avoid the whole Theo Van Gogh situation.”

The man is moved to tears by a personal story he shares at one point,
but he thinks giving me his web address makes him a candidate for
assassination? “Sounds like a New Yorker,” a friend of mine confirmed.

Here’s another thing about Todd: he’s crazy for collecting. Glass,
ephemera, boxes, and especially books. “My apartment is stuffed,” he
says, satisfiedly. “There are no more gaps in the walls.” He scrawls
a diagram into my notebook showing his divergent book collecting
interests: first editions, aesthetics books, fine press books (where an
effort has been made in the book’s design), and artist books (where an
artist contributes to the book’s production, like Matisse illustrating
Ulysses). And with this I’m led down another rabbit hole, a
micro-world of layers that spiral, onionlike, ever more tightly.

Why do people collect? The Internet is a fount of speculation. “A
collection gives the collector a sense of mastery of a given
subject—specifications, dates, serial numbers, relative rarity, value.
Furthermore, people who collect may find that their self-concept
becomes sturdier; their passionate interest helps coalesce their sense
of who they are and they feel a part of a community of similar-minded
people,” says John Sweeney, who collects cars, Tiffany studio lamps,
vintage motorcycles, antique wrist watches, and mechanical ice-cream
scoops. George Willard Benson, collector of antique crosses, believes
rather bombastically that “The collector has the true sportsman’s
spirit—the thrill, the confident anticipation and the uncertain
realization of the fisherman.” On a kids’ collectors website,
youngster Sara Morgenthaler expounds: “I think it’s cool to collect
things because it’s like a way to express yourself without damaging
your body.” And psychologist Alexandra Helper weighs in Psychiatric
Times: “Developmental scholars postulate that the collector may have
been burdened during the anal phase of development, with difficulty in
knowing when to hold on and when to let go.”

As a kid, Todd collected coins, covering the whole floor with them
until he’d made a mosaic. “It’s not about being covetous,” he says.
“It’s that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Perhaps we’re
back to Todd just being a New Yorker: the tension of urban living fuels
an acute need for a personally tailored sanctuary. Maybe I’m saying
this because I can attest keenly to it myself; couch-surfing in New
York City is far more exhausting than couch-surfing anywhere else,
after a few weeks one practically cries for four walls of one’s own.

So maybe it’s this being a New Yorker now that underlies my
five-hour-stint on an ephemera collectors’ site (or maybe I’m just
anal). I wish-list books on Amazon like it’s going out of business:
“Orange Crate Art,” “Some Early American Lottery Tickets,” “Old Sheet
Music: A Pictorial History,” “Visiting Cards and Cases,” and
“Collecting Playing Cards.” Every passion, according to essayist
Walter Benjamin, borders on chaos—but the passion of the collector
borders on the chaos of memory. Bad genes and pot smoke shot my memory
dead; maybe this spurs my urge to collect, too.

Collecting is about accretion, ingestion; Benjamin writes that it’s not
that the collector’s possessions come alive in him, it’s that he lives
in them—which is why object divorce is so hard for Todd, who refers to
the recent gifting of a decorative box to his father as “breaking up
with my box.” There are collectors and dealers, and never the twain
shall meet. Once, Todd bought a $7 Chagall book from an artist moving
to Germany. He sold it for $4500, but despite the 600-fold return,
it’s an action he regrets so deeply that the story comes up several
times in the conversation. “Hey, there’s a history to every object in
my apartment. Selling a piece is like cutting off a fucking finger,”
says Todd grimly. Even worse is selling lithographs or chapters out of
books. “I’m Jewish. We don’t cut books up.”

Todd’s Holy Grail—and that of countless other book hunters—is a
forty-page, paper-bound book, “Tamarlane and Other Poems,” whose author
is listed only as “A Bostonian.” It’s Edgar Allen Poe’s first
published work, and the print run is estimated to have been between 40
and 200. Only 12 copies officially exist anymore (allegedly, Poe
himself didn’t even keep a copy), but tabs on them are kept pretty
tightly, and for good reason; in 1988, a private collector paid
Sotheby’s $198,000 for a copy. Todd hopes that if he keeps trawling
through thrift stores, consignment houses, or Craigslist, he might some
day strike gold.

Now that I know, I’m might start looking...

* Does anyone know how to make a MacBook turn this picture 90 degrees to the right? I used to be able to! And now I can't anymore. John? Help, please?** Those are no longer their real names, obviously.

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What's this about?

Living in New York City means I see thousands of strangers every day--waiting for subways, smoking on fire escapes, filling jukeboxes in bars. I'm really curious about where they come from and why they're here, the signification of their scars, their favored methods of peeling clementines, the books they liked as kids, their heroes and vices, their nightmares and dreams.
In 2007, I started inviting them out to lunch and writing about it. This year, I'm the one being invited. It's way better!
If you know someone--an accomodating grandma, an interesting neighbor, whatever--who's good at making something (pasteis de nata, Listowel mutton pies, galette de rois, etc) and is willing to let me hang out, watch and talk while they cook, I'd love to hear about it!

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In October and November 2006, I meandered circuitously between San Francisco to Miami under the auspices of Minnesota-based nonprofit Renewing the Countryside, interviewing farmers, ecologists, musicians and activists for a book on youth revitalizing rural landscapes all across America. Here are some of the stories you'll find in the Youth Renewing the Countryside book, due out in the spring of 2008.